Things You Must Do After Installing Fedora

Fedora is the RedHat's desktop workstation with latest version being Fedora 25 which is a major version for Fedora Project Linux distribution and they've been working on lot of new versions lately. In this post, I've listed things to do after installing Fedora in order to make efficient use of it.

Fedora 25 comes with latest GNOME version. Hence it comes with various usability improvements including an efficient search interface, simpler input device and printer settings and more user-friendly music controls. If you've not had a chance to use it yet, go grab a copy and try it out.

Things To Do After Installing Fedora 25

So, once you've installed the OS, what are you gonna do? Well, here must do things after installing Fedora 25.

You just did a fresh install of the latest version of an operating system, and I'm asking you to update? Confusing? I admit it may sound so but it's very important as there can be new updates since they released Fedora 25, and you downloaded and installed. Thus, open a terminal and run the command:

sudo dnf update

Install Gnome Tweak Tool

Once you've updated the system, now you should a few apps. First of all, GNOME Tweak Tool - the most important program to customize your copy of Fedora. With this software you can easily install new themes, add/remove extensions and more.

sudo dnf install gnome-tweak-tool

Install VLC Media Player

Now install a media player. What's better than VLC? VLC is to media players what Chrome is to Browsers. A free and open source player that plays almost all multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols.

Additionally, VLC media player provides many features, effects and filters that are not available in Fedora’s default video player. In fact, default player does nothing except playing your file as is.

Get Google Chrome

Install this lightweight, fast and minimal design web browser. Go to Google Chrome Homepage and click on 'Download Now' then select the .rpm version for Fedora/openSUSE.

Activate RPMFusion Repository

This is important as RPMFusion provides stable and tested versions of many apps. It's a command line tool.

Uninstall Any Software You Won't Use

While it may seem trivial, it's one of the important things to do after installing fedora 25. In case there is a software that comes up pre-loaded on Fedora which you won't use, you can uninstall it. You can find the list of all apps in package manager.

Install UnRar

UnRar is RAR extraction utility used for extracting files from RAR archives. RAR archives are usually created with WinRAR, primarily in a Windows environment. Go to official link, download rpm per your requirements and install.

Customize Fedora

To customize various aspects of Fedora, you'll need GNOME Tweak tool we installed in step 2.

Fonts

Fedora uses Cantarell as the default system font. While it's very much aesthetically pleasing and serves the purpose pretty well, you might have a different choice - and why not since you can customize Fedora whichever way you want!

Themes

You can change themes of Linux desktops very easily with tweak tool installed above. One of the best features of Linux distributions for end users is availability of high quality themes by the community - unlike Windows where you're forever stuck in default UI designed by Microsoft.

You can download themes from GNOME-Look.org, unzip and place them in ~/.themes folder and activate via GNOME Tweak Tool.

Apart from desktop themes, you can also install Icon themes. Read full tutorial for installation and usage of custom desktop themes and icon themes.

Install Extensions

GNOME Shell has a lot of add-on and plugins for extending the desktop environment. Get these extensions ranging from weather reporting to system monitoring.

For Developers

Programmers have some special needs with their systems. So, here are some software you can choose depending on your need:

Firefox Developer Edition

If you’re a web developer and want a really neat solution for testing and debugging your website, you probably need Mozilla’s Firefox Developer Edition. It’s an awesome free tool which comes with a lot of powerful features to improve your code and productivity.